The lifelong long-distance swimmer even swam 20 miles from Catalina Island to Rancho Palos Verdes last year.

But on Saturday morning, in the final yards of a pier-to-pier swim from Hermosa Beach to Manhattan Beach with a group of fellow swimmers, Robles came face to face with a great white shark.

The 7-foot-long juvenile had been trying to free itself from a fisherman’s hook for at least a half an hour when it attacked.

“The shark came up out of the bottom of the water, lunged at me and bit right into my chest, along my torso,” Robles said. “I was locking eyes with this great white shark who was biting into my chest.”

Out of instinct, Robles said, he grabbed the shark’s nose with his hand and tried to pull it off. Surprisingly, the shark immediately swam away.

Robles, 50, had been swimming for 2 miles when the attack happened around 9:30 a.m., fellow swimmer Nader Nejadhashemi said Sunday.

“He said, ‘I’ve been bit,’ and he was screaming,” said Nejadhashemi, who didn’t see the shark even though it was just 5 feet away. “Then I saw the blood.”

Robles said he kept his eyes locked to the sky as he screamed because he didn’t want to look down at his wounds.

The bite felt like a never-ending burn.

“It was like a jellyfish sting that just keeps burning deeper and deeper into your skin and your pores,” Robles said. “It was very, very frightening. I thought I was going to die right at that moment.”

Nejadhashemi reached his friend and checked that “all his extremities were intact,” then comforted him as others in the group flagged a nearby paddle boarder.

“I don’t know how we managed to push him on the paddle board but we did,” he said. Once several surfers came over to help pull the board in, Robles was on his way to the shore, where paramedics treated his wounds.

The shark bite punctured an artery at the end of his thumb and lacerated his upper right torso.

He spent eight hours in an emergency room, where doctors cleaned out his wounds.

On Sunday, Robles, a real estate broker who lives in Lomita, said he was exhausted, but was beginning to regain feeling in his thumb, and the radiating pain in his chest was starting to subside.

“I feel like I’m getting a second chance on my life,” said the former lifeguard. “It’s like I was supposed to die yesterday. The shark could have held on, took me under. For some reason, he let me go.”

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The shark remained in the area for about 20 minutes after the attack Saturday and then disappeared into the murky water, said Rick Flores, a Los Angeles County Fire Department spokesman. The beaches remained open, but a milelong stretch was temporarily off-limits to swimmers. Police also prohibited fishing from the Manhattan Beach Pier where the fisherman hooked the shark until Tuesday.

It’s illegal to fish for great white sharks. The fisherman told several local media that he was trying to catch a bat ray, not a shark, and that he didn’t cut the line sooner because of how many swimmers were in the water. It wasn’t immediately clear whether state wildlife officials were investigating; a department spokeswoman did not return calls seeking comment.

Robles said the shark clearly stumbled across him while fighting for its life and likely bit him out of anger.

“It was so stupid what the (fisherman) was doing — beyond stupidity,” he said. “This has got to be stopped altogether. There should be no fishing on the pier anymore.”

Shark sightings are on the rise at some Southern California beaches, especially in the waters off Manhattan Beach, which is a popular spot for surfers and paddle boarders. Large crowds were at the beach for the warm Fourth of July weekend.

But actual shark attacks are rare. Since 1950, there have been 101 great white shark attacks on humans off California — 13 of them resulted in deaths, the state Department of Fish and Wildlife said. Lifeguards said Robles is the first person ever to be bitten by a shark in South Bay waters.

But this wasn’t the first time Robles had landed in the hospital after an ocean swim. Last August, after a grueling 13-hour swim in choppy seas across the Catalina Channel, he came ashore at Trump National Golf Club in Rancho Palos Verdes and immediately collapsed.

He was hospitalized for hypothermia and, according to medical tests, what appeared to be a mild heart attack.

“I’m not even sure how I got to the beach,” he said in an interview at the time. “I was in complete exhaustion.